ABOUT JOELLE STEELE

This is waaaaay more than most people want to know about Joelle Steele! She's a high-IQ (186) polymath with extensive credentials in many fields. She is a writer, editor, artist, photographer, and publisher. She is a court-certified expert in face and ear identification, forgery detection, and the usual and customary practices of the landscape industry. She is also a genealogist, astrologer, and legal writer. Many of her non-fiction works are about those subjects.

Joelle was born in 1951 in San Francisco as Nancy Norleen Martelli. She had her name legally changed to Joelle Steele in 1990. The family moved to the Monterey Peninsula in 1955. Steele had begun reading by the age of 3, and had nine years of private art and music instruction.

Joelle's parents both liked to write and were avid readers. Joelle was reading by the age of 3, and is also an avid reader of fiction and non-fiction. She reads at least one book per week, to the tune of more than 4,500 books to date. Her writing career began early in life too. She adapted a play from a children’s novel at age 10, wrote her first and only play at age 13, wrote her first novel at age 16, another at age 19, and a third at age 21. Those novels, though not suitable for publishing, were a learning experience in developing characters and plots.

On graduation from high school in 1969, Steele received a summer scholarship in intensive French from the Monterey Institute of Foreign Studies (now Middlebury Institute of International Studies). She then attended Monterey Peninsula College for a year and a half before she moved to Hayward and continued her college education there. Steele worked part-time as a senior illustrator and copywriter for an advertising agency. Her first article and short story were published in 1973.

In 1974, Joelle took classes on the Constitution and the law, torts, business law, and two courses in legal writing. In 1983, she began selling pre-printed contract forms for contractors and other small busineses which she sold by mail order through ads in various trade magazines. In 1994, she converted all 88 of those forms into customizable Word templates and sold them on one of her older websites, now for sale on joellesteele.com. She also began selling her contract forms (once a very minor business) online.

Steele dropped out of college in 1973 to get married. They moved to Bellflower in southern California and then back to Hayward. From there, Steele moved to San Francisco, and her first book of poetry, Under A Weeping Sky was published by Wunder Books. Then she moved to Burlingame, where she began working as the creative director for a small book publisher and also co-owned a recording studio. Then she moved back to Monterey before she relocated to southern California to Venice Beach in late 1978.

In 1979, Steele relocated to southern California and worked as the office manager and interior landscaper for a landscape contractor in southern California. By 1983, she co-owned a landscape business; wrote articles for numerous horticultural publications; and consulted and lectured internationally to the landscape trades. She owned two businesses for interior landscapers: an employment referral service and a quality control inspection service. She published two landscape periodicals; edited and published several horticultural books for others; and wrote and published eight of her own books for the interior landscape industry, including what later became known as the English & Spanish Guide to Interior Landscape Maintenance. Joelle is a court-certified expert in the usual and customary practices in the landscape industry.

She owned a residential property management business, two small businesses serving the landscape industry, and a small press publishing business. She published two landscape publications, four other small press periodicals, 17 of her own books, several by others for the horticultural industry, and several non-profit newsletters for others. And, she began teaching adult ed classes.

In 1980, her first novel, The Rosary Bed, was published by Chalke Press. In 1992, Steele’s illustrated Interior Landscape Dictionary was published by Van Nostrand Reinhold (now Wiley). That same year, she published a book on face and ear identification based on her experience as a genealogist identifying faces in old photograph albums.

By 1994, she obtained an Associate of Arts degree from Santa Monica College. She also received two degrees in Ornamental Horticulture and in Interior Design.

On August 15, 1994, Steele created her first website that she still has today: joellesteele.com (although she has had more than 15 other websites over the years).

In 1997, Steele again relocated. This time, back to her home town in Monterey. She returned to editing books and also began editing doctoral theses. It was in 1999 that Steele finally got her college degree through Cal State Hayward's brand new distance learning program.

In 2005, Steele relocated, this time to Lacey, Washington, where she has remained ever since. She is near Gorham Printing, which prints her perfect bound books, and Graphic Communications that prints her spiral-bound manuals and genealogies. She also began publishing in ebook format and doing digital photo restoration. She became adjunct faculty at several colleges, teaching writing, publishing, genealogy, web design, floral design, horticulture, painting, astrology, cat care, and more. She also developed online classes for colleges and other organizations.

As of 2026, Steele is the author of 68 books (fiction and non-fiction); 39 genealogical histories (for clients); 800+ articles; 60+ short stories; 9 advice columns; and numerous co-writes, contributing chapters, poems, lyrics, ad copy, jingles, speeches, interviews, and other works for hire.

Art - Illustration - Photography

Steele's parents both loved art and could draw well. Her step-grandfather was a trained artist from Italy, and some of her mother's friends were also artists. As a child, she had nine years of art instruction in Carmel, California. She had her first art show of eight very large oils in 1976. Ten years later, she created acrylic paintings for designers to match their clients' needs in southern California. She has also taught watercolor painting to adults.

Her parents also came from families who never went anywhere without their cameras. She joined their ranks by the age of 10, and she had a wide variety of cameras, mostly Rolleis. As an adult, she owned a portrait photography business and photographed portfolios for others in southern California. She still loves photography, digitally restores old photos, and likes to take photos of nature "up close."

Music

Joelle's parents had hundreds of records. Once again, Joelle followed in their footsteps. Today, her iPOD has more than 2,000 songs from all music genres on it. As a child, she took piano lessons for nine years and can't play a note. From about 1984-1996, she occasionally sang lead vocals with a band at fund-raisers in southern California. In the mid-1970s, Steele co-owned a small recording studio in the San Francisco Bay Area. She produced and co-produced demos, commercials, and corporate soundtracks. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, she wrote advertising jingles for an advertising agency. Throughout her life she has written many songs and song lyrics in need of someone to create sheet music and record them.

Genealogy

In 1974, Joelle began practicing genealogy. She started with her own family histories, and began practicing professionally in 1983. By 1994, her genealogy business had expanded thanks to the availability of a few early genealogy websites. She then started editing, writing, and publishing illustrated histories for her clients. She specialized in "deep dive" genealogy, often following her clients' roots back as far as a thousand years into the past. For five years, she was a volunteer editor and typesetter for the newsletter of the Swedish-Finn Historical Society.

Face & Ear Identification

In 1975, while helping a friend identify her family members in old albums, Joelle became interested in the use of the ears to identify people in photographs. In San Francisco that year, she met the world-renowned ear expert, Al Iannarelli, the author of "Ear Identification." After Iannarelli passed away in 2012, Joelle wrote and published "The External Ear," a more detailed book on ear identification based on her own experience as a genealogist identifying faces in old photograph albums, and using the wealth of ear photographs available for analysis online. She is also the author of several books on face identification, including Face to Face: Analysis and Comparison of Facial Features to Authenticate Identities of People in Photographs. Joelle was a court-certified expert in ear and face identification.

Handwritten Forgery Detection

Joelle was interested in handwriting analysis at an early age, but was not interested in the psychological interpretation of handwriting. Instead, she was interested in detecting forgery, especially in handwritten signatures. She is the author of Sign Here! Detecting Forgery in Handwritten Signatures. Joelle was a court-certified expert in handwritten forgery detection.

Teaching

In 1983, Joelle began teaching adult ed/continuing ed classes in southern California. She also lectured to small businesses and small press publishers and was a marketing expert on a call-in radio show for two years. The first adult ed class she taught was on writing poetry. From that point on, she taught classes in writing, publishing, genealogy, horticulture, small business management, website design, HTML/CSS, cat care, and many other subjects. After moving to Washington state in 2005, she became adjunct faculty at eight colleges. She taught her final class in May 2026.

Property Management

Joelle came from three generations of a family that owned apartment buildings in San Francisco and houses and farms in several areas of northern California. From 1975-1978, Joelle was the resident manager of a 9-unit apartment building in Burlingame, California. From 1984 to 1997, she was a resident manager of an 18-unit building and also managed 188 units (apartments, duplexes, and houses) in the areas of Venice Beach, Santa Monica, and West Los Angeles.

Assorted Part-Time and Temp Jobs

Joelle's first job was at the age of 8 when she delivered prescriptions on her bicycle after school for her godfather's pharmacy. She also worked in the office of her parents' business from the age of 10 to 18. She has since worked as a photo archivist, legal secretary, marketing writer, proofreader, ad builder/designer, inventory clerk, data entry clerk, mail list manager, accounts receivable clerk, statistical typist, and soldering technician.

Volunteer Work

Joelle's first volunteer work was in her late teens helping her mother administer hearing tests for Quota International on the Monterey Peninsula. While a student at Cal State Hayward (now East Bay) during the Vietnam era, Joelle wrote letters home for returning soldiers who were badly injured and being shipped to hospitals throughout the U.S. While in southern California, Joelle edited and published newsletters free of charge for several non-profit organizations. She was active in Consumer Action and Consumers Act Now in the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid-1970s. She volunteered as a procurements director for a non-profit organization and located unwanted/unused items to donate to small non-profit organizations that needed those items. As a writer, Joelle has donated many hours to helping dyslexic people decipher written documents and write letters, fill out applications, etc. Since 1980, when she was seriously ill and living in her car on the streets of Los Angeles, Joelle has donated her time and money to helping the homeless.